Every year on tax day, we get a reminder of the gender pay gap, and the counter-reminder from the “well, actually” douchebags on the right about “the gender pay gap is a myth“: That women choose to earn less money by going into less physically demanding, safer, and lower-paying positions, and men choose to go into more physically demanding, dangerous, and higher-paying positions overall.
But that cannot explain the gap when comparing similar positions:
It is well known that in 2013—the most recent year for which data are available—women working full time, year round earned an average of $0.78 for every dollar earned by men working full time, year round. Since this statistic compares all working women and all working men, it does not control for the different types of jobs that individuals hold. In all but one of the occupations for which data are available, however, women earn less than men.
Also note that these are occupations with wildly different percentages of women in each field, ranging from women comprising 17.49% of production and operating supervisors to 84.8% of general office clerks. There’s not an issue with burly manly strength and size needed to be a personal financial advisor last time I checked, but women earn only 62 cents on the dollar compared to men for that occupation. The one job where women earn more? Stock clerk, even though they make up roughly a third of them nationally.
And please take note that three jobs among those with the worst gender pay gap are physician, teacher, and CEO, successful jobs that require education and only one of the three is considered “pink collar”, teacher. The counter to that is again, “Women choose to have kids and be caregivers, so they’re not working as much. They’re not working as much, so they have less experience and fewer hours worked. They have less experience and fewer hours worked, so they get paid less.”
But that can’t explain the gap either. We know women in the US are having fewer children, and waiting longer to get married (if at all) particularly those women who are more educated (you know, like doctors.) And if anything, as more and more jobs move away from physical work towards information management, working from home is becoming more popular and more feasible for everyone.
Not only does the gender gap still exist, but when you factor in race it gets even worse. No, the gender gap is not 100% “discrimination”. But it’s not a myth either, and there are some serious structural problems in society that make this gap persist. Pretending that it’s something “bitchy liberals made up” doesn’t mean it’s not real, and that people aren’t getting hurt by it.
Karmakin
Equal pay for equal work legislation now. If you’re working the same job as someone else, you get paid the same on an hourly basis. Period. Zero room for deviation. I don’t care if you think that your deviation is justified. It’s not. There is zero reason why you’re worth more than your coworkers working the same job.
Unfortunately that’s the big hurdle to get over. Most people are going to self-justify why some people are worth more than other people doing the same job, including people who advocate for wage equality. Unfortunately, gender bias is ALWAYS going to creep into that system and it’s impossible to avoid, mainly due to wider cultural norms over child rearing and gender roles and expectations.
japa21
I’ve decided that the biggest reason that there is resistance to equal pay for equal work is the fear that instead of raising women’s pay, it would lower men’s pay, or a combination of both.
There are some jobs which it is more difficult to really evaluate. For example, many of the jobs listed are pay-for-performance jobs. Basically, they are commission oriented jobs. It is not that women are not able to do as qualified a job, but that there may be a built in bias against women, particularly from men who, for example, don’t believe a woman can provide them with the expertise at, say, finacial advice.
And reality is that among men, as a whole, despite the exceptions, there is a sense that they deserve to be paid more simply because they are men. To those idiots, having a woman being paid the same as them is demeaning. It is an extension of the resistance they had to having women enter more managerial roles, because they didn’t want a woman telling them what to do.
Unfortunately, there are still many women who buy into that same way of thinking.
BethanyAnne
I wonder if mandating pay disclosure would be a way of fighting this?
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Yep, women of color — especially Latina and African-American women — get hit with a double whammy because they experience both a gender and a racial wage gap. IIRC, even when you control for race/ethnicity, women makes less than men of the same ethnicity.
There’s also the issue that fields that are more dominated by women pay less. And it isn’t a “women go into lower-paying fields” effect — they’ve found that if women start to enter a field that used to be dominated by men, wages go down.
Lee
I guess there are a lot of school districts with a large number of male teachers. I’ve got a kid in 9th grade and a kid in 12th grade.
Both had their first male teacher in middle school. The oldest had 2 male teachers through middle school, the other had 1.
Now in high school, the youngest has not had a male teacher and the oldest has had 2.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
Financial advisor is a position where a lot of that gap is not due to employers simply not giving women the same salary. It’s an intensely commission driven job and most of that gap is going to be because women just aren’t selling as much as men are. And I don’t think that that’s entirely, or possibly even mostly, due to discrimination by either employers or customers. It’s arguably worse than that and gets to just how perverted the financial advice industry is: I suspect that the single biggest reason women earn less than men as financial advisers is because they’re better at actually giving advice to their customers.
Overall, the financial adviser industry is a scam taking advantage of people. When you look at the commission structures, advisers often benefit from guiding their customers into high fee products and churning them often. That’s just about the worst financial advice anyone can give you. For 98% of all people, maybe more, the best investment approach is to pick about five Vanguard funds, including 2-3 basic index funds, and put all of your money in them and just leave it there. I mean Vanguard specifically and not just some basic mutual fund company, too; John Bogle has put together a company that really is driven by customer service.
There is a large body of research that indicates that women put in charge of investment funds do better than men do. Some of it may be that to get to that point as a woman you have to be better than a man, so we’re looking at people farther out the right side of the talent distribution. On the whole, though, women tend to choose a more conservative investment strategy and do less chasing of returns. In other words, they tend to exactly what would benefit their customers more while making them less money.
It’s idiotic for reasons that go far beyond discrimination.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Karmakin: That’s never going to fly. Some people really are better at their job than other people and mandating that both people get paid the same amount regardless of ability would cause all sorts of perverse incentives. Let’s find a solution to this problem without creating one just as big.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@japa21:
To a certain extent, they’re perceiving a real problem since women entering a field tends to cause salaries to go down. But they’re blaming the wrong people for that effect.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Another thing that could help the wage gap if they hadn’t been dramatically weakened: unions. I’m in a union position that has a specific pay scale partially based on years of service and I get regular raises/boosts to the next level of the scale. When you have a formula like that, it’s harder for employers to dick people around on salaries.
Brachiator
Let’s do this as a Yes AND (rather than a Yes, BUT…)
We need more jobs, and those jobs should pay equally. Otherwise, you can pass all the equal pay legislation you want, and people would say, “wow, if I had a job, I guess I would have equal pay.”
We are still seeing the slow death of the US economy, and stagnant wages for existing jobs. A lot of work to be done.
CrustyDem
The good news from this is that if Hillary becomes president congress can lower her salary from 400k to 280k, based on statistics for CEOs. Every little bit helps lower the deficit! I’m sure the GOP will move fairly quickly on that…
HRA
Office politics, moving the goal posts, etc. also factor in on who gets the better salary. From my own experience where two separate groups of women were involved in a restructure, it did not matter for one group to be highly trained and productive in the same office.It mattered that the manager of one group was more productive and liked in making points with the director. The disparity in pay was a $4,000 start. When some of the group that was left behind, sought to get the same wage by applying elsewhere in the system for a position, they had upgraded the qualifications to a college degree.
Though I have to admit, the worse I have heard is a couple both working 2 minimum wage jobs to barely eke out a living.
Belafon
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Pay the same wage for doing the same job. If you’re better, you can move into a position that allows you to use those extra skills.
Yours is sort of the flip to the argument of whether we should provide assistance to the poor because a few of them abuse it. And my answer is yes, that little inefficiency improves most people’s lives. In your case, yes, someone really good may not get every dollar he possibly could, but the most people would benefit, and it’s not like your mythical worker is poor because of it.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Belafon: I think you’d end up with a lot of resentment in the workplace and an environment that’s as toxic as what you have now, just along different axes. I do think that pay should be transparent and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to hide how much their employees are making from each other.
I think that you’d also end up with different people’s jobs defined slightly differently in order to avoid the restriction.
Edit: Aside from that, there’s the problem that a lot people may be really good at the job they’re doing but wouldn’t be good in the higher tier position. What you’re saying is that the Peter Principle should be the guiding light of corporate organization.
RSA
From the article:
Not quite. That is, I believe there’s a gender gap, but it’s much trickier to tease out than this suggests. For example, the author is basing that 37.76% number on the category “Physicians and surgeons”, which isn’t just men surgeons versus women surgeons–it includes all specialities. A lot of the difference is due to specialties. For example, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, about 32% of active physicians in the U.S. are women, but it’s not evenly distributed over all specialties. More than 60% of pediatricians are women but less than 10% of neurosurgeons. There’s a huge differential in income between such specialties. Men and women aren’t choosing the same medical jobs. I don’t have anything to say about other kinds of jobs, though.
JCJ
I think you really have to be suspect of this with regard to physicians. My partners (one male, one female) and I get exactly the same payment for the codes we submit. The female member of our group has been with us for four years while I have been here 22 years and my other associate has been here for 26 years. Last year my female partner made more money than I did but less than the male partner. Why? She had fewer uninsured patients than I did. We are all radiation oncologists so we almost certainly have higher income than pediatricians, family practice doctors, etc of any gender.
Karmakin
@Tissue Thin: If you’re concerned with actual results in the short term, as so many people seem to be, then that’s the only solution. I can’t think of another one…not that I’m not open, but quite frankly I suspect people are just going to justify the bias in their own systems.
I think generally that @Mnemosyne has the best idea with unions if you’re NOT concerned about actual results, and you’re happy with the process itself being non-biased. But that also means getting rid of all the moralistic language out of this issue and tackling it from a more systems point of view. People are not intending to introduce gender bias into the system, it just happens to get there.
Heliopause
Here’s the problem; it explains some of the gap. Other factors that the linked study terms “life choices” (I don’t prefer that term myself) also contribute. According to the linked study the amount of the gap that is pure discrimination, if you will, is 7-12%.
The reason we need to keep all this in mind is that we’re going to see politicians volleying that 22% figure for the next year and a half, and if one of them tells you they have a political solution that will give women everywhere a 22% raise that person is lying to you. In a best case scenario a hypothetical “Pay Equity Act of 2017” would address only a portion of that gap, and since political solutions obviously never achieve all of what they are supposed to the real world benefit would be smaller still. Not to say we shouldn’t pursue these political measures, but any improvements coming from them will be incremental.
What’s going to be required to address all 22% is decades of effort, largely outside the formal political system. Cultural norms are deep-seated and difficult to change. And I haven’t even mentioned large scale economic policies, many enthusiastically endorsed by the neoliberals who lead the Democratic Party, which are depressing wage growth for everyone; the owners of the country are not going to give half the population a 22% raise without a fight, in fact, they’ll certainly attempt various social engineering measures to keep the money flowing in the desired direction. So, for instance, one reason (of many) to oppose the increased financialization of our economy is so that genuine progress might be made on the gender pay gap. One reason (of many) to oppose mass incarceration of men is to ease the child-rearing burden on women. And so on.